Eimear McBride adds Geoffrey Faber prize to honours haul

Won in the past by JM Coetzee, Julian Barnes, JG Farrell and Seamus Heaney, the Geoffrey Faber prize has gone this year to Eimear McBride’s debut A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, a novel which judges said had “opened a new door for literature”.

The £1,500 award was established in 1964 to celebrate Faber, poet and founder of the literary publisher Faber & Faber. Going in alternate years to a work of prose or poetry by a writer under 40, it has been won in the past by a roll call of great literary names, Farrell taking the prize for Troubles in 1971, Heaney for Death of a Naturalist in 1968, Barnes for Flaubert’s Parrot in 1985, and Coetzee for Waiting for the Barbarians in 1981.

“I’m absolutely delighted that my book was chosen and it’s a huge – if somewhat intimidating – honour to be added to the prize’s long and illustrious back-list of recipients,” said the Irish writer McBride, whose much-celebrated debut, which took 10 years to find a publisher, has already won the Goldsmiths prize, the Kerry Group Irish novel of the year award, the Desmond Elliott prize and the Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

The novel is addressed by a young woman to her brother, who had a tumour removed from his brain as a child. It demonstrates, said Geoffrey Faber judge Patrick Neale, a bookseller, that “there are exceptional voices and stories out there”, and has “opened a new door for literature”.

“Although the Geoffrey Faber prize doesn’t have as its specific remit the commendation of excellent books that have somehow escaped widespread notice, we did hope to do something along those lines. So we had at first believed that Eimear McBride’s much-praised book might not qualify,” said Neale’s fellow judge Gaby Wood, a journalist. “But what she has done in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is so linguistically daring, so formally skilful yet so heart-churningly strong that we thought, in the end, not to applaud it would be an act of blindness. I think all of the judges were delighted – and quite relieved – to find the others felt the same.”

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing was initially published by small Norwich press Galley Beggar in June 2013, with a paperback edition later released in partnership with Faber & Faber. Neale and Wood were joined on the judging panel for the award by the author Deirdre Madden.

In her review of the debut in the Guardian, the Booker prize-winning novelist Anne Enright called McBride “that old fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose that can be, on occasion, quite hard to read”.

“Here, for example, are the opening lines: ‘For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say,’” quoted Enright. “If this kind of thing bores or frightens you, then there are many other wonderful books out there for you to enjoy. The adventurous reader, however, will find that they have a real book on their hands, a live one, a book that is not like any other.”